In a sea of emails, if your recipient has to spend more than a few moments deciphering your message, it is going to get skipped.
Here is a key tactic to getting your emails read and responded to:
Put the action, request, or most important information in the first line of the email.
In essence, you want to write your email backwards.
5 comments:
In this modern world where one of the main methods of conversation with people is through email it is important to be able to write an email to people. But it is also equally important to write an email that people will not only read but also answer. As this articles says that way you write the email is very important. The ideas that he raises are very interesting and I am going to give them a try.
Although the advice given in this article is helpful in getting your point across in an email, I have some trouble taking the article seriously given the way it's written.
The one line paragraphs, the repetition of previously stated information, along with the hard to understand syntax, made this article very troubling to get through and severely hindered my ability to take their advice seriously.
The advice is definitely helpful in some cases, but the format did not match the content, and in my mind, that discredits the author's formatting advice.
I do this all the time! When I am writing an email I always know the point I want to get across and what I want the reader to take away. The challenge has become how/what do I put around those points to make a well written email. Working backwards I able to make sure everything that I am writing is necessary. The coolest thing is that all of my sentences flow together is a very beautiful way that I don't get when I'm writing an email from the beginning to the end. This article has got me thinking, would this technique working for writing things more than essays? I guess I'll have to try it out and let you all know!
I’ve been guilty of burying questions in emails more times than I can remember, and I’ve just never thought about how my reader would receive or review the information. Normally if I had one or more important questions, points or details I would bullet point them, that way they were at least set apart from the body of the message. But I suppose that’s only useful if the recipient actually reads that far. Just yesterday I actually drafted an email using this technique, well mostly. The email required that I introduce myself first, but then I wasted no time in getting to the point, “…would you, recipient be willing to___.”, or rather some phrasing of this was the second sentence of the message. I then filled the body of the email with an explanation of the task, details, and reference information. I haven’t sent the message yet, so it’s yet to be determined if that approach will be successful, but it seems like a logical tactic.
“Email should be short. And emails should be clear. And emails should be straight to the point.”
This is something I always forget when composing an email. I tend to structure the email like I would structure a written argument, which this article points out is not the way to compose an email.
I think the most important thing to take away from this particular article is “”If you feel like you need to write a book in order to explain your issue, then it shouldn’t be an email in the first place.” Its true, and I think that too often we spend as much time composing an email as we would just walking down the hall and talking to the person.
I will say that I probably write very long emails that could be much, much shorter, perhaps I should start trying to write emails backwards and see what that gets me.
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